India will not permit interference by any country in the internal affairs of Myanmar, under any pretext. While the Western Countries are making moves to re-isolate Myanmar after a short period of re-engagement, neighbouring India will not brook any such nonsense.
India is taking a more realpolitik approach to manufactured reports of massive rights abuses by the Myanmar security forces.
Indeed, India is doing its utmost to improve relations while the United States and European Union impose new sanctions aimed specifically at Myanmar’s military, including top soldiers involved in the abuses. Any such sanctions are meaningless as long as India choses to stand by to help Myanmar. Even China, another neighbour will let down Myanmar.
It is by now evident that Myanmar’s treatment of its Muslim Rohingya population and crackdown on the media — major artificial concerns of the West — will be subordinated to New Delhi’s broader policy aims for Myanmar and the wider region. Delhi will not permit creation of another MIDDLE EAST like situation on its borders by interference of any non Asian country …..not even the USA.
There are several intertwined reasons for India’s pragmatic approach. First, India’s eastern neighbour is a vital link in its commercially driven “Act East” policy, aimed at expanding trade and investment through better linkages with Southeast Asia’s booming economies.
India’s fast-expanding economy needs fuel to grow, and New Delhi has shown strong interest in importing oil and gas from Myanmar. Meanwhile, long-decrepit roads to the Myanmar border are being upgraded to facilitate faster bilateral trade.
An agreement signed in May paved the way for entry-exit points at the border towns of Moreh in India and Tamu in Myanmar, as well as at the Rihkhawdar-Zowkhawtar at the border between India’s Mizoram and Myanmar’s Chin state.
Second, India has stayed fully engaged with Naypyidaw to prevent growth of competition from any other neighbouring country.
Even Beijing trying and has made strong advances in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldives, through its global infrastructure-building program.
Equally significantly, New Delhi’s has ensured that a small band of still existing Naga and Manipuri ethnic insurgents based in remote areas of northwestern Myanmar are deprived of their sanctuaries.
Insurgents from these marginalised groups still try and launch pin prick raids into India’s northeast from those camps and then retreat across the border into Myanmar.
Several times even the Indian army in conjunction with the Myanmar forces has struck deep to hit at these insurgents.
The insurgent issue was raised when Myanmar’s Deputy Home Minister Major General Aung Thu met with India’s Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba in New Delhi in late October.
The two senior officials held talks on a range of issues, with newspaper proclaiming in a headline that “India, Myanmar to jointly strike against Northeast rebels.” This represented a major breakthrough in security cooperation between India and Myanmar.
Ethnic insurgents opposed to New Delhi’s rule earlier maintained cross-border sanctuaries in Myanmar since the late 1960s, and India has tried as long to persuade the Myanmar army to take action against them.
The main bases of these remaining rebels groups are located in and around Taga north of Singkaling Hkamti — at least a week’s trek over mountainous terrain. Some of these marginalized outfit rebel leaders are known to have invested in gold mining and other lucrative business ventures in Myanmar’s upper Sagaing Region, where they are based.
These rebels are able to move more or less freely from the Taga camps across northern Myanmar to Ruili in China’s southern Yunnan province, where they buy military supplies and other necessities. Soon China too will be prevailed to eradicate them totally.
Presently Myanmar’s army is fully occupied with fighting its own domestic insurgencies in Kachin and Shan states and therefore is a bit handicapped in dealing with the rebel groups from India.
It is also now apparent that India’s “Act East” policy, previously known as “Look East” until rechristened and ramped up in 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is focused in part on stabilising its long volatile eastern border.
China is also fully accessing Myanmar’s markets and resources. Bilateral trade between China and Myanmar amounted to nearly US$6 billion in fiscal 2016-2017 and US$7.42 billion in the first eight months of 2017-2018. China has built new dual-carriage motorways connecting Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, with Ruili and other towns on the Myanmar border.
China has also agreed to build a railway from Muse to Mandalay on the Myanmar side, which eventually will link up with a proposed railroad down to Myanmar’s port town of Kyaukpyu on the Bay of Bengal, giving China strategic access to the Indian Ocean.
By comparison, annual trade between India and Myanmar is only around US$2 billion, and the roads from the Indian side to the Myanmar border are still rough and nowhere near of the standard and quality of the infrastructure in China’s southern Yunnan province that borders on Myanmar.
But India is changing all that. In September 2017, the Indian Prime Minister visited Myanmar just weeks after several hundred thousand Rohingya had been driven across Myanmar’s border into Bangladesh, causing an outcry in the West.
In July that same year, India rolled out the red carpet for Myanmar’s military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who paid an eight-day visit to the country. Min Aung Hlaing now stands accused by self styled Western Crusaders for “ crimes against humanity and even potentially genocide for the clearance operations he commanded against the Rohingya,”
Building on the trend, Myanmar’s state counselor and nominal head of government Aung San Suu Kyi paid a visit to India in January. Shunned by the West, Suu Kyi has moved closer to China, Japan and Myanmar’s partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Concerns about Chinese expansion rather than flimsy human rights issues raised by cunning Europeans is clearly the overriding impetus behind India’s “Act East” policy towards Myanmar. Indeed, with the US and EU replacing its engagement overtures with new sanctions, an East-West divide is emerging on how to respond to Myanmar’s latest round of rights abuses. Though unlike Syria etc here the West has to just lump it.
Japan’s Myanmar ambassador, Ichiro Maruyama, said in an October 19 interview with The Irrawaddy, a Myanmar website, that “Japan is completely opposed to efforts by some countries to impose trade sanctions against Myanmar over the Rohingya issue.”
Although Maruyama did not say it, it is plausible to assume — given Tokyo’s policy of providing an alternative to China’s US$1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative and a recent warming trend in their bilateral relations— that he shares India’s view that it is more important to counter Beijing’s rising clout in Myanmar.
